System/360 Turns 40System/360 Turns 40

It's been lionized as one of history's greatest industrial achievements, along with the Boeing 707 and the Model T Ford; it helped send astronauts to the moon; and it led to the rise of automated airline reservations, the U.S. Medicare system, and bar-code scanning. It also made IBM one of the world's most powerful companies and eventually "fat, dumb, and happy," according to one of its creators. On Wednesday, 40 years to the day after IBM launched its original System/360 mainframe, its inventors and computer-industry veterans hosted a panel discussion at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., to recall the product's birth.

"I would allege such a thing could never happen again in modern world business," said Bob Evans, IBM's VP of development in the early 1960s, who spent 33 years at the company. By the time IBM launched the 360 on April 7, 1964, it had spent $5 billion, hired 60,000 people, and opened five plants to support what was considered the largest project in private industry at the time. IBM also killed several product lines to make way for its achievement--considered the most-sophisticated computer of its time--and left its customers up for grabs.

In the early '60s, Thomas Watson Jr., the son of IBM's founder, was only a few years on the job as CEO, the transistor age was dawning, and IBM was facing tough competition from RCA and Honeywell. "The competition was eating us, and we were obsolete," said Frederick Brooks, the former project manager for System/360, now a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina and author of The Mythical Man-Month, one of the best-known books on software engineering.

How long ago was that? In 1964, the Warren Commission determined that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone, "I Want To Hold Your Hand" was the No. 1 song, and Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali.

IBM was also a $3.2 billion-a-year company. By 1970, six years after it launched the 360, annual revenue had doubled to $7.5 billion. Last year, IBM reported $89.1 billion in revenue.

At first, the computers didn't sell well. Mainframes ushered in technical innovations such as the 8-bit byte, compatible software that ran up and down the product line, and the first widely used disk operating system. But spring turned into summer 1964 without many orders. Evans thought, "Damn, we've built an Airstream," he said, referring to a 1930s Chrysler dog. "But in July, the orders started, and they never stopped."

Revenue from renting out mainframes and associated software filled IBM's coffers. By 1966, the company was shipping 1,000 of the machines a month. The 360 powered American Airlines' Sabre airline reservation system; NASA's space flight programs, including the Apollo 11 moon shot; and countless banks and government offices. Evans and Brooks, as well as Erich Bloch, a former IBM corporate VP and National Science Foundation director unable to attend the event, received the National Medal of Technology from President Reagan in 1985.

Not everything about the 360 was a success, Brooks said. He called the computer's JCL programming language "the worst. It wasn't designed; it just grew as needs appeared," he said. "So many things were done right, and every now and then something was royally messed up."

Revenue from the 360 also made IBM complacent, Brooks said, and probably caused it to miss the minicomputer revolution that propelled Digital, Hewlett-Packard, and Data General to the top of the tech market. Of course, those companies then missed the PC era, he pointed out.

According to Brooks, Watson bet IBM's future by spending heavily to build the mainframe and discontinuing enough products that it risked customer defections. Said Brooks: "He later said he'd never do it again."